Fabian Lehmann — Member of the Month, November 2017

If you look at the recent Member of the Month recipients, you’ll notice one thing they share in common (aside from being awesome): they are all incredibly active in Q&A and have answered literally hundreds of questions.

But as I was trying to choose the latest Member of the Month, something occurred to me: What about our active bloggers? I know there are members who take the time to write informative posts, so why should their contributions be overlooked?

My bad.

With this in mind, I went searching for a member who not only blogs frequently, but who also draws positive response.

I found Fabian Lehmann, and I’m happy to recognize him as November’s Member of the Month.

Prolific blogger and the latest Member of the Month, Fabian Lehmann

This year alone, Fabian has written nearly twenty blog posts — often as series on a variety of topics. That’s probably why more than fifty people follow him, as I’m sure they all look forward to what he is going to publish next.

And while we’re on the subject of publishing, I should probably stop yapping and publish my interview with Fabian.

Let me be the first to congratulate you, Fabian. How does it feel to be the latest Member of the Month?

Jerry, yeah, thank you! I am surprised and feel honored as a Member of the Month of this great community.

Before we dive into your fantastic contributions for SAP Community, I’d like to learn more about your career. According to your profile, you work for Sycor in Germany. Can you tell me a little bit about your company and what you do for them as an SAP Solution Architect?

For sure. Sycor Group is an international midsize full-service ITC provider.

I have been working here in the SAP department for the last five years in several roles: I started at Sycor as developer in the area of the SAP Hybris. Three years ago I became responsible for the innovation topics around SAP Cloud Platform and the new SAP Leonardo IoT Portfolio. In the role as Solution Architect I am also involved in the pre-sales process, especially in the area of SAP Cloud Platform and Internet of Things. Furthermore, I create demos for our sales team and try to push the new topics internally in our department and finally for me one of the important things is to share my knowledge internally. Especially the last six months, I was involved in the beta phase of the SAP Cloud Platform IoT service and SAP Cloud Platform Application Enablement, based on the new Cloud Foundry environment together with the people from the SAP Product Management.

Whether writing for community or presenting in person, Fabian is where the cool…um…stuff happens.

I noticed that the majority of your blog posts are about the SAP Cloud Platform, so I assume you consider yourself an expert in this field. Can you tell me how you got involved in cloud technologies?

Let’s start with the beginning of my career in 2007. After my studies, I started first with the good old SAP NetWeaver stack (the fridge) and here especially in the area of Enterprise Portal. Later on I moved over to the SAP Composite Environment and to the SAP NetWeaver XI/PI. In one of my projects as consultant from my former employer, I got in touch with a customer. This enabled me to get involved with some of the newest SAP products. This was a very creative time and as result it was clear I wanted to work more with the new and innovative SAP stuff.

If we talk about innovation, we see here from my perspective SAP Cloud Platform as the central part. My first contact with SAP Cloud Platform was in 2012 as I started at Sycor and began my first openSAP courses about SAP Cloud Platform and SAP HANA.

As someone who knows how long it can take to write a blog post, I’m really impressed by your output. How do you manage to squeeze writing into your schedule?

Squeezing writing blogs into my schedule is not always easy, but I get a lot of support from my employer, which helps me to find time. Nevertheless some of my blogs are finished in my spare time or on the weekend.

Do you happen to remember the very first thing you ever blogged about in the SAP Community (or SCN)? What motivated you to blog for the first time?

A short recap to my first contact with the former “Software Developer Network,” short SDN. The SDN was in the beginning of my career the central place to get my knowledge or ask something. I made SDN my start page of my browser and every day my first task was to check the new content and try to learn new stuff.

Anyway my first blog was motivated as a result of two presentations at the “SAP Cloud Platform Integration Info Day” in Walldorf 2016 and the “DSAG Jahrekongress,” where I built a scenario. The scenario showed how we could use SAP CP IoT Services 2.0 (the old one) in combination with SAP CP Integration (aka HCI). Finally, I used SAP Cloud Analytics to visualize the data.

Then I started to write blogs. For me blogging is the best possibility to share my knowledge with others and hopefully to show how easy things can be.

In addition to blogs, Fabian has started to share his CP/IoT experience through SAP Inside Tracks.

When and why do you choose to write a specific blog post? Is there anything in particular that inspires you?

From my perspective it’s easy to become successful with SAP CP. Especially if you play around with different solutions and microservices and combine this to build realistic E2E scenarios — such as combining Business Rules services and Workflow services together with SAP CP IoT services, SAP CP Integration and S4/HANA or SAP Hybris Cloud for Sales. In addition, I simply like to show how you can build such scenarios and get successful.

However, the main reason is the community approach. I think it is important to share knowledge and to help others by answering questions. Moreover, this was one thing which I took home as an attendee from my first SAP Inside Track in the beginning of this year in Walldorf! After this, I have started also to support SAP Inside Tracks by contributing my experience around SAP Cloud Platform and SAP IoT service.

If you don’t read Fabian’s blogs, you’ll make Ella sad. And you don’t want that, do you?

Beyond writing blogs, is there anything else you do in your downtime? Any hobbies or activities that interest you greatly?

The primary hobby is of course my little family with our two wonderful kids (2 and 8) and our little dog, Ella. During vacation I love to travel to Korsika. At the weekends I love to cook tasty things, especially from the Italian kitchen with its huge diversity. Furthermore, I try to build up some liitle projects together with my son based on a “Calliope Mini” (a little microcontroller) to help him a little bit to take the first steps in programming.

Like father, like son. Fabian is helping his son take his first steps in programming.

Let’s circle back to your writing. It’s no secret that members are discouraged with the amount of traffic in the blogging areas. Is there anything you do to help promote your posts?

At the moment I am using Twitter and sometimes LinkedIn. That’s all.

Out of all the activities open to community members, blogging seems to be the most intimidating, in my opinion. Perhaps it’s because of the time investment required to research and write something. It may be because many members aren’t native English speakers, so they feel nervous about writing in another language. Maybe it’s a combination of several things. So my question is this: What advice would you give someone to help them blog successfully?

My advice here is “just do it,” but keep in mind to build a good structure first. Write a short introduction and a good explanation. At least I hope to do that. Finally do not write about the same topic again! Moreover, a good blog can be an opportunity to get deeper in this topic for others.

Great stuff! Once again, Fabian, I want to congratulate you for becoming the latest Member of the Month for SAP Community. Please keep on writing and posting content that members benefit from reading!